William Burges and Francis H. Kimball architectural drawings collection

William Burges (1827-1881) was an English architect of the High Victorian Gothic style, and is now considered a preeminent English architect of the Gothic revival movement. Though he was little-known in the United States, Burges was chosen by Trinity College president Abner Jackson in 1872 to design the College’s second campus when the Trustees approved a campus move from Downtown Hartford to Summit Street. Historian Christopher Drew Armstrong described the Jackson-Burges relationship as “perhaps one of the most ambitious collaborations between a college president and an architect.” The College Trustees Building Committee reviewed Burges’s preliminary plans in 1873, and in the summer of that year hired Francis Hatch Kimball to work with Burges on the design and to supervise construction.

Francis H. Kimball (1845-1919), an American architect, later became known as the “father of the modern skyscraper.” Along with New York City’s Empire Building and Casino Theater, he worked on Hartford’s Charter Oak Life Insurance and Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company buildings.

From 1873 to 1874, Burges and Kimball designed an elaborate four-quadrangle plan for the new campus including a chapel, library, museum, art building, dining hall, theater, astronomical observatory, professors' apartments, and students’ housing. The buildings were to have multiple stone arches, wood-trimmed dormers, stone towers, and spires, all in French Gothic style. The entire plan called for a campus that stretched over a thousand feet. After reviewing the completed plans, the Building Committee requested that Kimball make budget-conscious modifications. The four quadrangles were reduced to three, and rather than build the entire campus at once, the plan was divided into stages. The first stage encompassed two separate buildings which included the library, dining hall, dormitories, and one block of lecture rooms. In 1875, Kimball’s modifications were approved, and construction began. The first two buildings, named Seabury and Jarvis, were completed in 1878 and the new campus officially opened that year. Due to financial constraints, Northam Towers, a gatehouse and dormitory that linked the initial two buildings, was not completed until 1883. At a collective 600 feet, these three buildings comprised the Long Walk and were intended to form the west end of the middle quadrangle. However, the majority of the buildings envisioned in the ambitious quad plan were never constructed by the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, the Trowbridge Master Plan of 1923 would revisit and modify the architectural plan for the twentieth century.